Sentiment analysis is the computational study of people's opinions, appraisals, and emotions toward entities (e.g. products for sale, organizations, events and individuals). A growing online source of public opinion is the microblog. Microblogs are short web blogs, and are often posted on social media websites (e.g. FACEBOOK® and TWITTER®). People may provide, in microblogs, personal statuses, tweets, comments, etc. Opinions mined from microblogs may provide advantageous insights into public sentiments on various entities.
However, it may be difficult to identify and determine opinions for entities effectively using this class of data. Microblogs are typically short. For example, a tweet, which is a post on the TWITTER® network, is currently limited to a maximum of 140 characters. The data sources may also be noisy and prone to spam. Another issue is that opinions are commonly expressed in a manner specific to the domain, thereby incorporating emoticons, colloquial expressions, abbreviations, acronyms, neologisms, etc. These characteristics may increase the computational complexity of sentiment analysis on microblogs.